Author: Brad Grier

One of the cool things that my wife and I do togeth­er is play video games. Yep, we both enjoy them. I’m lucky, I guess.

Halo (the ori­gin­al) was one of the first for Xbox that we both could play the cam­paign game sup­port­ively, co-oper­at­ively. This is very import­ant — as our First Per­son Shoot­er (FPS) skill levels dif­fer, so we can both play to our strengths — cov­er­ing each oth­ers weak­nesses.

As well, there’s some­thing cool about hav­ing a shared exper­i­ence in a vir­tu­al world — some­thing you can talk about over break­fast, plan strategy on the drive to buy gro­cer­ies, whatever. It’s a way to share this pre­dom­in­antly male hobby with your sig­ni­fic­ant oth­er.

So, Halo is fun. Play­ing Halo cam­paign with your mate (espe­cially if one of her favour­ite movies is Ali­ens) is more fun. Anti­cip­at­ing Halo 2, dis­cuss­ing it, read­ing about it, drool­ing at the screen­shots — you got it — even fun­ner™.

Then over the week­end, I’d read that Halo 2 will not sup­port co-op cam­paign play over the sys­tem link, or inter­net.

Major Dis­ap­point­ment. We were look­ing for­ward to:

Full Screen (2 Xbox­en, 2 Mon­it­ors, 2 Halo)

Voice com­mu­nic­a­tion with live head­set

Involving oth­ers via inter­net hos­ted games

Sigh — what will be included with the released ver­sion of Halo 2 will be co-op cam­paign mode play­able on a single Xbox — same as the ori­gin­al. After all this devel­op­ment time, they’re basic­ally giv­ing us a slightly improved game, but no real bene­fit to those who enjoy
play­ing the game with oth­ers — rather than against oth­ers.

The com­pet­it­ive FPS folk out there will not really miss this fea­ture, but as someone who does enjoy co-op gam­ing, Halo 2 is already dis­ap­point­ing. We’ll still buy it, still play it, and likely still love it, but this one fea­ture would have made it gold.

Here I am, look­ing through my port­fo­lio of work, and I notice that I don’t have any­thing that rep­res­ents any radio work. So I think to myself, “Self, what can we do about this.” Self says, “Well, since you’re learn­ing quite a bit about net­work­ing as you devel­op this new career, why not do an item on Net­work­ing?”. Self is a pretty smart guy, some­times. So, here it is, in MP3 format, my (just under) 3-minute item on Net­work­ing. Com­ments?? You know where to post ‘em.The full text is in the exten­ded entry…below

I stand amid­ships, the deck lurch­ing with every motion of the craft â€œ the beast surges onward, obli­vi­ous to the con­di­tion of my fel­low trav­el­lers inside.

My Whale moves, from place to place, fol­low­ing it’s own path, heed­less of the desires of it’s pas­sen­gers â€œ krill.

Upon occa­sion, My Whale stops, lets loose a mighty sigh, and dis­charges one, or a few, of my fel­low trav­el­lers â€œ as if they’ve provided their nutri­ent value and are noth­ing more than mere Excre­ment.